Technical Field
The present disclosure relates to management of facility operations, and more specifically, to a distributed system that enables a user to collect facility data during a walkthrough of the facility and maintain the equipment within the facility.
Discussion of the Related Art
Operating mission critical facilities may involve monitoring numerous building functions and equipment on a regular basis. If an individual performing such monitoring observes that equipment is operating outside of its designed limits, various steps may need to be taken to correct the situation.
Further, comparison of equipment data with benchmark values can provide a reasonable indication that equipment is close to failing or that it is operating near or exceeding its designed limits.
In the event of emergencies, facility component maintenance shutdowns, or other site specific events, facility engineers may be required to complete procedures from memory or using paper instruction. However, since these procedures can be long and complex, they can be difficult for a human operator to perform without assistance. Further, since procedures may change over time, one or more of the operators may not have the most up to date procedure.
Radio frequency (RF) is a wireless non-contact use of radio-frequency electromagnetic fields to transfer data, for the purposes of automatically identifying and tracking tags attached to objects. A barcode is an optical machine-readable representation of data relating to an object to which it is attached. Image recognition is use of computer algorithms to recognize an object from within an image.
However, currently there is no way to make use of RF tags, barcode tags, or image recognition to assist in performing facility walkthroughs and maintenance of facilities.